I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.

I never had much interest in being a child. As a way of being it seemed flat, failed to engage.

I came into adult life equipped with an essentially romantic ethic.

We imagine things — that we wouldn't be able to survive, but in fact, we do survive. ... We have no choice, so we do it.